Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
Meessen De Clercq is a contemporary art gallery that brings a group of international artists.
The gallery occupies three floors in a house built in 1911, including a separate video space and a “Wunderkammer”, offering a particular look on the “Theatre Of The World”. The gallery also publishes catalogues and editions in close collaboration with its artists, in order to promote and distribute their work even wider.
For ART-O-RAMA 2010, Meessen De Clercq will gather 3 artists in a show that questions the iconic status of the image and our relationship to space and time.
In a co-production with ART-O-RAMA, the gallery will present a new piece by Fabrice Samyn which consists in 365 postcards bargained at flea markets and slightly diverted from their original purpose : give news to relatives. This framed series of postcards shows only their front side (the image) while a “cartouche”, a small window cut in each card, once returned, allows us to discover part of the text written at the back. At each occurrence, the same statement, the same words : “Je suis” (I am) assert their presence when common use has led them to lose their meaning.
These words, in such a setting, lead to a reflection upon life while referring to leisure and banality in the expressions we use in “postcard-literature” : “Je suis bien arrivé”, “Je suis ici pour deux semaines”, “Je suis content d’être ici” (“I am here for 2 weeks”, “I am happy to be here”, etc.)
This meticulous work (365 postcards; one per day) underlines the importance of being – living – in the present tense.
Along with Patrice Samyn, Meessen De Clercq will present American artist Sarha Bostwick who questions space illusion with bas-relief, composing false perspectives that echo their exhibition space, as well as, Patrick Everaert who creates images in which space is confusion. Patiently awakening images he has found and been collecting for years, he humorously shakes some of the false certainties led by our senses. In the frame of ART-O-RAMA 2010, he will present new pieces.